Colour neo-traditional tattoo of two skulls, one in a blue top hat smoking a pipe and one in a jewelled feathered turban, across a forearm.

Two coloured skulls in hat and turban on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two skulls sit side by side across the forearm, the left wearing a blue top hat with a red band and a monocle while smoking a red-bowled pipe, and the right wearing a purple turban with teal feathers and a row of gold-coloured gems. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth shading in olive, yellow and orange, and wisps of smoke rise between the figures. A partial playing card with a spade shape appears at the top left, and the composition fills the frame edge to edge against a black background.

Neo-trad Traditional Forearm Skull Top hat Feather Pipe Monocle Smoke Gemstone Playing card Spade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry drops you at Scarrow Quay with a tin trunk, a borrowed coat and one card up your cuff, and the harbour master tells you the game is already running. Captain Pell has been at the back table of the Gull and Lantern since Tuesday, his monocle polished, his red-bowled pipe sending up a thread of smoke that hangs under the rafters like a question. Beside him sits Madame Sahira, who reads fortunes for the fishermen and has never once been wrong about a hand.

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The stake is the lease on the lighthouse cottage at the north point, the last dry roof on the island. You take the chair opposite and count the gems along her turban the way other people count their bad years: twelve amber, one red at the crown. She deals with fingers that never hurry. Feathers shiver every time she lays a card down, and the room smells of tar and clove and the sea coming in under the door.

By the ninth hand you understand that the pair are not playing you. They are playing each other, the way they must have done before the split that ended their act on the mainland, and you are only the table they have chosen. Pell's sleeve slips. A single spade falls onto the wet boards, and you pick it up, and the room goes quiet enough to hear the lamp hiss.

You lay it face up beside your last card. Pell's pipe goes out. Sahira laughs, one low note, and pushes the deed across the table with two fingers. 'Keep the light lit,' she says. You pay the ferryman in tobacco and walk north in the dark, the spade still warm in your palm.